Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Lord Byron’s Daughter Started the Computer Age by James Essinger (review)

As long as Byron had a daughter safely on the other side of Europe, he felt tenderly towards her: ‘Is thy face like thy Mother’s? my fair child / Ada! sole daughter of my House and heart?’ he asked – as he sailed away from her. If he had a daughter in the house, as he had with Allegra, he felt nothing except dull duty. In semi-facetious vein he worried about Ada: ‘Is she social or solitary – taciturn or talkative – fond of reading or otherwise? – and what is her tic ? – I mean her foible – is she passionate? – I hope that the Gods have made her any thing save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in a family’. What he would have thought had he known where her talent would really lay, we may imagine: ‘They stare not on the Stars from out their Attics, / Nor deal (thank God for that!) in Mathematics’ (Beppo, 78, 623–4).

There have been two biographies of Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Doris Langley Moore’s Ada Countess of Lovelace, Byron’s Legitimate Daughter (1977) and Betty A. Toole’s Ada the Enchantress of Numbers (1992). Essinger argues that Babbage actually wrote ‘Enchantress of Number’, and that he was referring to his Analytical Engine, not to Ada. Langley Moore gets Ada’s friendship with Charles Babbage out of the way in half-a-dozen pages, being just as concerned with her mother and with Medora Leigh; James Essinger confesses himself more indebted to the more computer-literate Betty Toole, whilst adding, unfairly I think, that ‘[t]here has so far been no biography of Ada that fully defends the genius of her thinking’.

Essinger is not far into his narrative before we find him being imaginative: Byron’s Napoleonic coach was not ‘gilded’; the bailiffs did not pursue him to Dover; he fell in love with Edleston at Cambridge, not at Harrow; he did ‘repulse’ Lord Grey de Ruthyn’s advances at Newstead. And who purchased Lady Melbourne for £13,000? No-one did: that was the price paid for the young Lady Blessington.

The writing is sometimes poor: ‘The social and moral atmosphere of Harrow was much of the time literally a hotbed of homosexual activity’. His evidence for this baggy statement is in any case from an account written over half a century later. He writes, himself insecure, for the uninstructed: ‘Trinity College, the largest and probably the most famous of the colleges of Cambridge University’. King’s College might object here. He is not afraid of stating the obvious: ‘Bath’, he tells us on page 50, is ‘in England’. Fielding was ‘the creator of immortal, wordy but entertaining and somewhat bawdy novels such [sic] Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). These novels were written some decades before the 1830s’. He is not afraid of terming Robert Burns ‘the famous Scottish poet’. An American readership is perhaps being targeted.

When we read, ‘Some biographers have even suggested that Annabella and Augusta had lesbian feelings’ [sic] ‘for each other, for which there is no unassailable evidence’ (my italics), our obvious question is ‘Why then mention it?’ There is, in fact, no evidence at all for the idea.

If he is this sloppy with Byron, and the other ladies, how will Ada fare? Essinger spends five pages in summarising the history of the Industrial Revolution, climaxing (here he echoes a previous book of his own) in the invention of the French Jacquard loom, which, he implies, fuelled Ada’s interest in the possibilities of computerised machinery. When he arrives at the bit we have been waiting for – Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine – it is clear that the Difference Engine (which he seems to describe well, though by this time you are on your guard) was entirely of Babbage’s creating, and that all Ada could do was wonder at it. It seems...